Page 2 of The Girl with a Secret
Instinctively, Rosa took a step away from her parents, and then glanced back at the petite blond woman further back in the line. She saw her taking in the whole scene with a look of bafflement and Rosa raised her eyebrows sardonically, determined to set herself apart from her parents’ behavior. The woman grinned back, and the tension in her stomach eased a little.
“Please, Mother, Father,” she murmured in a low, urgent voice. “Let’s just board the ship…”
“Oh, very well, then,” her mother replied testily, and she flounced past Rosa, pulling her long, satin skirts away from the dirty floor.
“After you, darling,” her father said, giving her a teasing smile, which Rosa forced herself to return, if only a little. Her father had always been so sure of his ability to charm her, and too often he’d been right.
Not any longer, she told herself as she marched toward the first-class boarding gate. She didn’t look back once.
A few minutes later, after they’d walked past various sumptuously elegant lounges and halls, a steward led them to their first-class suite—one of the best on the entire ship. Nothing, Rosa knew, was too good for the Herzelfelds. They had two bedrooms as well as a private sitting room, all of it expensively and tastefully furnished with sofas and armoires, bureaus and desks, a porthole in each chamber overlooking the harbor.
Her mother shrugged off her fur stole as she ran her fingertips along the top of a cherrywood dressing table, as if checking for dust. “We’ve been on better ships,” she remarked, and Rosa almost rolled her eyes, except this time she had no smiling audience.
“Well, this one will do the job,” her father answered rather shortly. “It’s not a pleasure cruise, Elsa, after all.”
“Darling, I know.” As always when her father became the tiniest bit terse, her mother turned instantly placating. It was a pattern Rosa was familiar with, and made her want to grit her teeth, as well as cringe in shame, for it was one she all too often participated in, as well. Her father had the sort of domineering and charismatic personality that made her and her mother want to both please and appease him, even when Rosa wished she didn’t. “I was only remarking upon it,” her mother continued, resting a hand on her father’s sleeve, her lacquered nails digging in. “You know I believe you deserve only the best.”
Rosa turned away from them to find her own room, separated from her parents by the sitting room. It was slightly smaller, with a single bed, desk, and dresser, its porthole overlooking the harborside. She glanced outside at the dock in the distance, still bustling with activity. Her last view of Germany, the only country she’d ever known as home. What would Ernst be doing right now, she wondered, and then cursed herself for thinking of him at all. How he could still occupy a place in her brain, never mind her heart, remained an intensely frustrating mystery, and one she chose not to unravel.
“Fritz, let’s celebrate!” she heard her mother cry, her voice rising anxiously, as if she sensed he was slipping away from her already. “Why don’t you send for champagne?—”
“Not just now,” her father replied, his voice managing to sound both charming and irritable, a tone he’d perfected over the years, whether he’d meant to or not. “Perhaps after we’ve sailed, Elsa, when we’re truly safely away. Don’t you think that would be better? We’ll raise a glass then, almost certainly. Now, you look tired. Why don’t you sit down…” Her father’s voice dropped to a coaxing murmur and Rosa closed the door of her cabin, grateful to have some privacy, as well as some space fromher parents’ theatrics. Already it felt as if it would be a long voyage, cooped up in these few rooms—a far cry from the palatial villa they’d once lived in on the banks of the Wannsee, before the Nazi government had requisitioned it. Her father had seen the writing on the wall then, she thought sourly. It had been about time.
And now they were on theSt Louisat long last, looking ahead to their new lives and all their possibilities, either in Havana or America, if they were lucky enough to get visas for the latter. Her father certainly seemed confident that they would, but privately Rosa had her doubts. The shaky prestige her father had enjoyed in Berlin might not, she feared, stretch to Cuba or the United States. It might not even stretch on board this ship.
A light tap on her cabin door startled her out of her thoughts. She rose from the bed and went to open it.
“Rosa,Hase.” Bunny. It had always been her father’s pet nickname for her, an endearment only he used. “Shall we explore the ship?”
“What about Mother?”
Her father shrugged, the movement, as so much about him was, expansive. “She was overwrought from our journey. I gave her a spoonful of Luminal to calm her nerves.”
A barbiturate and strong sleeping aid that her father prescribed her mother with rather reckless abandon, considering it was lethal in larger doses.
“All right,” Rosa said after a second’s pause, because she wanted to explore the ship as much as he did, even while she felt guiltily glad that her mother wouldn’t be accompanying them. Alone with her father, Rosa could often forget how much his behavior disgusted her—and simply enjoy his company. “Let me just get my hat,” she told him, and hurried to fetch it.
Her father was waiting by the door of his cabin, her mother already sprawled on the bed, still in her evening gown and deeply asleep.
“You didn’t have her change?” Rosa asked, unable to mask her disapproval. Her father’s expansive bonhomie could so easily tilt into cavalier callousness, maybe even cruelty.
He shrugged, smiling. “What does it matter? She looks comfortable enough.”
Only because she was drugged to the gills, Rosa thought, but did not say. Her mother would have taken the Luminal willingly enough; in fact, she might have even asked for it.
Still, Rosa couldn’t keep from going over and slipping off the high-heeled sandals and drawing the coverlet across her slender, supine form. Her mother might act as if she loathed the sight of her, but the feeling was not mutual. At least, not always.
Rosa straightened as she turned away from her mother. “All right,” she said, and could not keep from feeling a flicker of excitement at the prospect of exploring the ship, despite her mother snoring softly on the bed. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 2
They headed down the corridor to the center of the ship, where the main first-class areas were—an elegant dining hall, a wood-paneled reading room and library, a two-story social hall with a wrought-iron balcony above, and then the sports deck and swimming pool. Plenty of other people were wandering about, their expressions often of cautious hope, the brightness in their eyes dimmed by a certain wariness. After all, the ship had not left Germany yet. As Rosa and her father strolled through the social hall, she couldn’t help but wonder, like so many others, if it was all too good to be true.
“Well, whatever your mother says, it seems a good, solid ship,” her father remarked in his booming, jocular tone that was clearly meant to carry to the other passengers, let them know his opinion mattered.
A few people gave them speculative or even suspicious sideways glances as they walked along; Rosa couldn’t tell what they thought of her father from their faces. She suspected it was a sort of baffled bemusement—he was impressive to look at, with his dark, brillantined hair swept back from a high, aristocratic forehead, his wide, white smile that he beamed on just about everyone. He stood several inches over six feet, with broadshoulders and chest, and he didn’t so much inhabit a space as overwhelm it. He didn’t walk quite so much as strut, one hand tucked into the front pocket of his waistcoat in a style that Rosa thought was uncomfortably reminiscent of the Führer. Next to him, she felt like a drab sparrow—her plain, belted dress did no favors to her straight, boyish figure, and her dark hair had been scraped back in a bun. Once she’d enjoyed dressing up, playing a certain part, but not anymore. Maybe never again.
“With plenty of entertainments to be had,” her father continued as he slid her a smiling glance. “Should we visit the nightclub?”
